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Medicare Medical Home Demonstration

Finally! CMS Provides a Flood of Details About the Medicare Medical Home Demo

I’ve been critical in the past when CMS has been silent in explaining their thinking, so I’ll start this post by congratulating CMS on sharing a flood of details about the upcoming Medicare Medical Home Demonstration project.

An email from CMS arrived in my inbox this morning at 2 am.  That email notified me that they have updated the MMHD homepage .  A quick click lead me to 8 new documents containing 155 pages of newly available details on the MMHD.

If you have time to read […]

Details “Emerge” on the Medicare Medical Home Demonstration

Where would one expect to find CMS’ latest thinking on the upcoming Medicare Medical Home Demonstration project? The obvious answer would be “on the Official CMS MMHD home page ”, but you’d be wrong.

CMS has issued a Medicare Medical Home Demonstration Payment Contractor RFP available on the Federal Business Opportunities website. Thanks to the Google Alert service for digging this out.

For the casual reader, the details of the MMHD are taking shape nicely. CMS and its advisors have obviously […]

Medical Home PowerPoint and Latest Perspectives

Last week my esteemed colleague Dr. Jaan Sidorov and I conducted a webinar for WRG on Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) developments.

The process of updating a PowerPoint forces one to collect one’s thoughts, and I’m glad to share with you the PowerPoint slides along with a few highlights about the evolution of the PCMH. The highlights:

The Medical Home Hits the RUC

Today’s post (#2 in a series) tackles several questions:

What is the American Medical Association/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC)?
What is the RUC’s role in the Medicare Medical Home Demonstration project?
How are people reacting to RUC recommendations for PCMH reimbursement levels?

What is the American Medical Association/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC)?

The AMA formed the RUC to act as an expert panel in making recommendations to CMS on the relative values of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes using the Resource Based Relative Value […]

The Medical Home: Confusion Over Care Management Fees

The honeymoon is over.

Prior to April 29, 2008, reviews of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model  had been uniformly enthusiastic and positive.

Today the PCMH model is hitting reality — someone’s going to have to bring home money to pay the bills. On April 29 the American Medical Association/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC) released a  report making recommendations relating to payment levels of care management fees for the PCMH.

This report has stirred cries of confusion and outrage. I’ll elaborate on these cries in the second posting of […]

One More Dark Cloud in the Stormy Skies of Medicare DM

Mathematica Research has just released a report: The Evaluation of the Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration: Findings for the First Two Years.  It’s not pretty.

Section F of the Executive Summary is entitled “Synthesizing the Findings: What Works, and What Doesn’t”.  That section begins:

Given that few of the programs have shown convincing evidence to date of reducing beneficiaries’ need for hospitalizations and saving money or of improving the quality of care received, there is relatively little assessment that can be done yet […]

The Cats are Herding!

We’ve all heard the saying that getting doctors to agree is like herding cats.

Well, it’s happening.

Four physician organizations representing 330,000 doctors issued a press release voicing their support for Joint Principles of a Patient-Centered Medical Home. The four groups are the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).

So?